Havre DeGrace Decoy Museum

Capt. Bob Jobes could use more customers like the one who walked into his shop one day and said, “How much do you want for those decoys?”“All of them?” Jobes replied.“Yeah, all of them,” the man answered.“He bought 50 that day, and now that guy has 650 of my decoys,” Jobes said. “When he was a kid he’d hunted over plastic decoys, and he’d always wanted to hunt over wooden decoys.”Jobes, 51, is the older of two brothers who learned how to carve decoys from Robert Madison Mitchell, who is known as the “dean of decoy making.” It was Mitchell, born in 1901, who made Havre de Grace the self-proclaimed “Decoy Capital of the World.”

In photo 1, ducks and geese feed and rest on the shoreline near Havre De Grace, Md., nationally considered the Decoy Capital of the World. James Overstreet photo.